


A Question Put To Nature

by seinmit



Category: Hannibal (TV), True Detective
Genre: 1990s, Abuse of Authority, Canon-Typical Pretentious Conversations, Discussions of Murder, Doctor/Patient, Hannibal is a Terrible Psychiatrist, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Pre-Canon, Referenced Suicide Attempt, Suicidal Thoughts, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 10:26:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20740706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seinmit/pseuds/seinmit
Summary: North Shore Psychiatric Hospital. Lubbock, Texas. I spent four months there in ’93.Hannibal Lecter is Rust Cohle's new doctor.





	A Question Put To Nature

**Author's Note:**

  * For [M J Holyoke (wholeyolk)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wholeyolk/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文-普通话 國語 available: [[translation] 自然之问 A Question Put To Nature](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21530632) by [hieroglyphics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hieroglyphics/pseuds/hieroglyphics)

> I hope you enjoy your gift!
> 
> This is playing around with Hannibal canon about what he does pre-show, but I consider it essentially "compliant" in the sense that both Hannibal and Rust end up the people they are in their respective television shows.
> 
> This is in the tags, but I wanted to reiterate: there is a definite content warning for extensive discussions about suicidality and several referenced suicide attempts, both by main characters and others. There are also some truly awful therapeutic practices. I also play fast and loose with how much time an inpatient psychiatric patient would actually get to spend with their doctor.
> 
> Thank you to Gammarad for her lovely assistance in beta-ing this through several drafts.

Rust hadn’t ever thought of himself as a guy particularly attached to the rules, but a couple weeks locked in the crazy bin with a bunch of loons made him realize that he was, actually. He’d sit in group with people who couldn’t bring themselves to wait their turn in the conversation, who’d beg and plead for narcotics instead of answering questions—and he felt that itch, he did, he didn’t think he was any better than them, just better at hiding his own form of insanity. He realized that he wasn’t the sort of crazy that couldn’t listen to social cues and more than he ever had before, he realized the important difference between _choosing_ not to listen and actually being incapable of it. 

There was a big white guy, Mike, maybe two eighty, maybe six three. He had a face that always looked like it had already been punched. The clinician asked him about the breathing exercises she’d suggested for dealing with his anger and he started talking about his pain, how intense his pain was. The woman next to him had hair that was knotted enough that the orderlies were surely going to shave it off soon and she shifted without ceasing on her chair, as if she was climbing out of her own skin. She looked like Rust felt when he was jonesing, but that’s just the way she was. 

“It’s my back, doc,” Mike said. “I wake up and I have this shooting pain up my spine, just totally overwhelming. It’s definitely making me sad. And angry. I can’t control my pain because I’m in too much pain, I think I need more of the drugs.” 

Mike laughed to himself, sly, like he thought he was getting away with something. Rust watched him and felt a little bad for the fucker. He wanted what he wanted, but he didn’t know the levers to push to get it. Like a rat who’d never been properly conditioned on the experiment. The clinician wasn’t wearing a lab coat—she always dressed in bright, soothing colors. Her modest blouse today had little yellow flowers all over it. She wasn’t a doctor, but she never corrected any of them when they called her doc. But she was watching him with the cool, judgmental eyes of someone who was looking for something, waiting for the right cue. They were all being measured. 

It wasn’t his turn to speak, but he couldn’t bear to let this go on any longer. 

“I’ve been trying the meditation thing,” Rust cut in. “That you talked about yesterday.” 

He hadn’t, but some residual sense of himself as the guy who knew the answers to questions had him talking, had his stomach lift when she turned her dark eyes to him and let them go approving. 

“That’s great, Rust,” she said. “Tell me about it.” 

He floundered, suddenly forced to account for a thing that never happened. 

“It didn’t work so well,” he said. “But I tried for emptiness, like you said. I imagined myself as a leaf on a river, floating along consciousness. But I kept getting caught on flotsam and jetsam, eddies of thoughts and feelings. It was impossible to push past ‘em.”

She smiled at him, gentle and encouraging. “Meditation is the sort of thing that takes a lot of practice. Keep working at it.” 

He sat back and let her turn her attention to another guy. She hadn’t said anything helpful, but his intervention got the group back on track and it soothed his mind a little, to have people talking in turn again.

* * *

He was a well-behaved patient, imagine that, the Iron Crusaders would never have recognized him. Well-behaved meant he got access to cigarettes and a lighter. A dark-skinned nurse had told him that the organization that accredited hospitals had banned smoking in all of them just last year, but they made an exception for psychiatric wards.

Rust lit his next cigarette on the butt of the last one and took a deep, satisfying drag. 

“Nice of them to have sympathy for the downtrodden,” he said. “Positively Christian.” 

The nurse laughed and said, “I think they just didn’t want to force us all to rip your tobacco out of your hands. We have enough problems.” 

“A cornucopia of problems,” Rust said. “A menagerie. Better than a soap opera, I imagine.” 

“Honestly,” he said. “Y’all aren’t that interesting.” 

Rust laughed and tapped the end of his cigarette into a little paper cup he’d taken to carrying around. Part of him wanted to ash on the floor, make a mess of this dingy white ward, but he couldn’t risk getting privileges taken away. 

“No,” he said. “We aren’t. There’s nothing more banal than human tragedy, is there? Just a bunch of folks who can’t keep it together enough to pretend to be normal.”

The nurse made a face. Rust had made him feel guilty, apparently. 

“Y’all have had hard lives,” he said. “Some hard shit has happened.” 

Rust shrugged. “As far as I can tell, that’s just the human condition. And us humans in here, we are just the ones who can’t maintain racing shape.” 

The nurse visibly lost patience with this conversation. He got up from the table where he’d been taking his own smoke break. Rust got the impression that some of the staff liked spending time with him because he was able to string sentences together and it allowed them to feel like they were capable of treating the patients like humans. 

“That’s me,” he said. “Gotta go back to the track.” 

Rust tipped his cigarette toward him in farewell and settled back in to watching the show.

* * *

Most of the time in the ward was spent doing nothing. Rust embraced that as best he could. He tried to shut his mind off and overwhelm his memories with a whole lot of nothing. There wasn’t much to look at, and like the nurse said, the other patients weren’t all that interesting. 

Because he was such a good, trustworthy patient, no one objected to him having a notebook and a pencil. Pens were out, because all that metal could be dangerous. (Rust tried to imagine someone killing himself with a ballpoint—how would you even do it? Could you cut through your own throat with that blunt metal tip, with enough desperation behind it? He imagined the strength you’d have to use, the way the flesh and tendons would drag against your hand.)

Rust was teaching himself how to draw. There wasn’t much to draw, but he figured it was good practice to sketch the regular geometric shapes of the walls, the barred windows. It was more entertaining than staring into space and there was only so much time he could spend smoking or eating. 

“Rust?” someone said. He looked up from his drawing. 

He resisted the reflexive urge to correct them on his name, tell them to call him Detective Cohle on the one hand or Crash on the other. Rust felt entirely wrong, but the people of the hospital had picked the most familiar version of his name and insisted on it to the point where it became strange. 

“You have a private meeting with the doctor right now,” the dark-skinned nurse said. 

Rust stood up and folded the little notebook up, put it in the pocket of his sweatpants. The weight dragged them low on his hips. They’d taken the drawstring. 

The ward was structured around the smoky glassed-in nurse’s station in the center. It reminded him of the panopticon, that old super-efficient design for a prison. You never knew who was watching, so you acted like someone was always watching. Eventually you wouldn’t need discipline anymore to follow the rules, you’d keep yourself in line. The room where patients met one-on-one with the doctor, though, that was off to the side. The window was tinted. Nobody could look in. 

Some patients had big orderlies come in with them, to protect the doctors, but Rust had been well-behaved. A good patient. 

When Rust walked into the room, a new doctor was waiting for him. 

He sat down, fished his pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, and tapped it on his palm. 

The doctor was a young white man. Couldn’t be thirty, maybe close to twenty-five. His face was smooth and his skin was clear, almost preternaturally so. He had small, deep-set eyes and sharp cheekbones, angular cheeks, and a patrician nose. His lips were disconcertingly plush in comparison. He had an uncanny, intriguing face that made Rust sniff, reflexively contemptuous. He was dressed impeccably, flashily. Not the usual harmless look the doctors tried to project.

“You aren’t Dr. Richardson,” Rust said. Dr. Richardson was about seventy and had an accent thick as honey, a face like dirt splattered on the mud flaps of a truck. Rust tapped the cigarettes, over and over. Excessively. 

“No, I am not,” the man said. He had an unfamiliar accent. “I’m Dr. Hannibal Lecter. I’m a resident here at North Shore. I recently finished my training at Johns Hopkins.”

Rust finally fished out one of the cigarettes. The tobacco was packed so firmly in the bottom he had to loosen it between two fingers, rolling out the leaves so that it would burn even. 

“You ain’t from around here,” Rust said. He let his own accent get stronger, went for _ain’t_ instead of _aren’t_. The man was foreign, had gone to a fancy school, and was a doctor besides. He probably would underestimate Rust, without even being able to help it. 

Dr. Lecter smiled, a twitch of the left side of his mouth. 

“No, I am not,” he repeated blandly. “I was born in Lithuania. I completed most of my medical schooling in Florence.” 

Rust lit his cigarette, cupping the flame in his hand to shield it from non-existent wind. 

“Long way away from home,” he said. 

“Mr. Cohle,” Dr. Lecter said. “One thing I’ve learned is that most people are away from home.” 

Rust quirked an eyebrow at Lecter, leaning back in his chair. There was something faintly ridiculous about this kid talking like he had vast stores of experience. He was still wet behind the ears, without any kind of life in his past. Rust felt the smoke curl in his lungs and thought of how a hit felt in his blood, how a gun felt in his hand. He didn’t say anything. 

“How are your wounds healing?” Dr. Lecter asked. 

“Almost entirely pain free,” he said. He could feel the grisly keloid scars on his skin, stretching when he shifted, but they didn’t hurt so much anymore. He wasn’t going to run any marathons, but he wouldn’t have done that anyway. 

“That’s good to hear,” Dr. Lecter said. He didn’t ask about withdrawal, or cravings, or anything to do with Rust’s addiction. That was unusual. The doctors were almost always most interested in that.

He shuffled the files in front of him. Rust had the strange sensation that what seemed to him right now as nerves was more akin to an actor trying to figure out which role he was actually supposed to play. Like Dr. Lecter understood the whole arc of Acts 1 and 2 and somehow forgot which was his monologue. He opened the manilla folder, looked at a paper. It was entirely for show. 

“Your records say that you’ve killed four people. Is that an accurate count, or are there a few lives missing?” Lecter said, calm. 

Rust flinched all over, hard enough the ash fell off the end of his cigarette, and then glared at the man for making him react. 

Lecter couldn’t entirely conceal his smile. 

One more, Rust wanted to say. A little girl on her tricycle. Two more, he wanted to say, the girl’s parents. A dozen more, people whose doors he’d knocked down and stolen the drugs they’d need to pay their debts, people he’d put in prison with kids waiting behind for them. He didn’t say any of that. Lecter wasn’t his fucking priest and he didn’t need a priest besides. 

He could have gotten angry. He considered it. But it wasn’t the role he was supposed to play. 

“Four people,” he said. He sucked a drag off his cigarette. “Four pieces of shit, more like.”

“Does it make it easier to remember, Mr. Cohle, if you remember them as subhuman?” Dr. Lecter said. He sounded idly curious. 

The question stilled Rust. He heard the tiny crackling burn of his own cigarette and the movement of air in his lungs. 

“Yes,” he said. 

Lecter smiled, not bothering to try and conceal it this time. He seemed pleased, almost proud. Part of Rust roiled with displeasure, at this snot-nosed kid daring to feel _proud_. 

“You get off on shit like this, doc?” Rust said, hard as a knife. “I’m thinking you maneuver to get the guys who’ve got blood on their hands. You like talking about it.” 

He was flying on instinct, but his instinct had gotten him a long way over the years. 

Lecter shrugged one shoulder, easy as anything. “I find the psychology of those who have taken life fascinating. Would you prefer a psychiatrist who found you abhorrent?” 

“Yes,” Rust said, immediately. “I like having things in common with my doctors.” 

Lecter leaned forward and hovered his hand over Rust’s cigarettes, an implicit appeal for permission. Rust nodded. He was curious, despite himself. His impulses were oscillating wildly between the desire to be defiant and the desire to play the role he was supposed to play. The thing keeping him calm was the knowledge that non-compliant psychiatric patient was a _very_ common role. It would in no way be true defiance. Some stubborn part of him wanted Lecter—and the rest of them—to know that he was different than the people whose thoughts were so disordered that they were incapable of complying. His rejection of society was a choice, not an incapacity.

He watched Lecter fish one out delicately and light it. He took a drag and settled into his seat—his back was still straight, but inclined away from the table. 

“I’m curious,” he said. “If you find your actions so repulsive and are so unhappy with your life, why you haven’t chosen to end it.” 

“I did,” he said. “That’s why I’m here, surely that’s in my files. Overdose on sleeping pills mixed with alcohol and the painkillers for my wounds.” 

Lecter tilted his head in an acknowledgment. 

“Don’t lie to me, Mr. Cohle,” he said. “If you wanted to die, you’d be dead. You had plenty of firearms, you know how to use them. Overdoses are an inefficient way to die.”

“Maybe I just wasn’t thinking right,” he said. “People make bad choices, sometimes, especially folks trying to come off dope.” 

“There are many hypotheses about what predicts fatal suicide attempts, Mr. Cohle—“

“Rust,” he cut in, suddenly certain. “Call me Rust.” 

“Very well,” he said. There was a faint tinge of annoyance in his voice at being interrupted. “Scholars have tried to predict who will succeed in their suicide attempts for years, Rust. Some of the most useful predictors are hopelessness, the perception of oneself as a burden to society, and a general desensitization to death and violence.” 

He took a drag of his cigarette. It felt like a purposeful break in his little speech, a caesura in some hidden soliloquy. 

“As a police officer, particularly one who has taken many lives over the course of his work, you are very desensitized to death. It makes me wonder, then, whether or not you have hope you have not acknowledged or if you feel yourself to be useful to the world. Do you have any theories?” 

“You aren’t like any doctor I’ve ever talked to,” Rust said, almost to himself. He stubbed out the cigarette in the omnipresent paper-cup. Lecter nudged the pack back toward him. 

“I’m not,” he agreed mildly. Rust thought he saw some private joy in his eyes, at that, but it was well-concealed. “Unlike the others, I hope to actually be helpful to you.” 

“By telling me that you’re surprised I’m not dead?” he said, sharp. 

“By helping you realize that you do have purpose,” he said. “That you’ve always had it and that some part of you knows that.” 

He smiled, thinning his lips without showing any teeth. “Or would you prefer that I agree with your nihilism?” 

Rust really wanted to know just what Dr. Richardson had put in those notes about him. He opened his mouth to ask—but a knock on the door interrupted them. 

He went still, resisting the urge to turn around. 

“Time’s up, doc,” a nurse said. 

Dr. Lecter looked displeased. 

“Very well,” he said. “I’m going to suggest that we meet daily. I suspect you are a more difficult case than you let on.”

Rust didn’t argue. He grabbed his cigarettes, shoved them back into his pocket, and emerged from the cave of the meeting room back into the light nothingness of the ward.

* * *

When he drew for the rest of the day, he for the first time started drawing people. Not Lecter, but other people, in the vague sense that he’d have to work up to a guy like that. 

“The fuck you looking at?” a big white guy snarled at him. 

“You,” Rust said. 

He got punched for his troubles. The orderlies broke it up, dragging the other guy away from an unresisting Rust. His nose was bleeding enough to drip on to his drawing, leaving marks that would dry brown and dirty.

* * *

“Tell me about your daughter, Rust.”

Rust was tense in his seat. He’d been waiting all morning to be tapped and lead to the cave where the doctor would meet with him. His drawings had gone strange, drifting away from the view in front of him and turning into something else. 

“Her name was Sophia,” he said. 

“Wisdom,” Lecter said. “You like the Greeks?”

“I read,” he said, defensive.

He spent most of the time around folks like him, or those with even fewer resources. But every so often in his life he had found himself in a room full of people from another world. He’d always been aware, in those moments, of two things simultaneously. One, all these teachers, and lawyers, and respectable professionals—they all had been to a four-year college and he had not. Folks like him were impressed by an associate’s degree, but not people with real college. Two, none of them ever actually wanted to talk about his latest obsession in the way that he wanted to, not like he used to daydream that the college-educated would. 

“Of course,” Lecter said. “What do you read?” 

Rust felt like this was a strange and suspicious reprieve from talking about his daughter. He picked at the plastic still covering the outside of his cigarette pack, fussing with it. 

“All sorts of things. What does it matter?”

Lecter tapped his fingers against the table once, twice. Rust couldn’t decide if it was a tell of some sort or an affectation. 

“Modern psychiatry works very hard to differentiate itself from its past. We are evidence-based, you see. There are all sorts of studies being done on exactly what combination of treatment interventions will help keep people alive and help them along toward flourishing. The reality of the situation is, however, is that what we do is no different than any priest, shaman, or philosopher that has sat down and thought about what it means to be human.”

Rust felt enraptured by Lecter’s low, accented voice. He tore his eyes away and looked down at the cigarettes he was playing with. He lit one. “Oh yeah?” he said, cigarette in his mouth. “And what does it mean to be human?”

“Will,” he said. And waited, like a schoolteacher, to be asked clarification. 

Rust could wait. He smoked his cigarette and as the silence lingered, he smiled just a little. 

Eventually, Lecter started talking again. He did not reveal any annoyance and was on the verge of smiling back at Rust. “Have you read any Schopenhauer, Rust?” he said. Lecter said his name a lot. He wondered if it was a way to develop trust. 

Rust shook his head. 

“Schopenhauer was in conversation with a tradition that liked to think that the world was stable, as it was, and that human rationality was able to provide meaning. They weren’t all theists, not exactly, but many of them were—the ultimate point was that human beings have the ability to think about the moral law and that is what separates us from the animals.” 

Lecter’s voice was soothing, almost like he was telling a bedtime story. Rust found himself leaning in, listening close. 

“But Schopenhauer realized the absurdity of all that. For him, there is no meaning to the world. Everything—all people, all things that seem so important—it’s all just will. Humans want things, so many things, and we build these vast conceptual castles devoted to our own desire. The world and the humans that live in it don’t have any universal moral law they act under. We just want things and we will never get them. The meaning of life is the fruitless, yawning desire for more.”

“Sounds like addiction,” Rust said, without thinking. 

Lecter smiled at him, approving. “That’s exactly it. We are all addicts, looking for our next hit. And like all addicts, it makes us very unpleasant to deal with. Prone to violence.” 

The cigarette between Rust’s fingers had burned down low enough that he could feel the heat of the cherry radiate on his skin. He stubbed it out and looked at Lecter, examined his smooth, alien face. 

“Or, of course, that’s what Schopenhauer would say. Modern psychiatry tells us, though, that a sense of meaning is one of the most important features in a productive human life,” Lecter said. His voice didn’t change in intonation, but there was something conciliatory about this softening. Rust felt like he was being preemptively forgiven for failing to understand. 

It set his teeth on edge. 

“After your daughter died, did you find meaning in your police work? In being one of the agents of order against the vast, roiling chaos?” he said. “You must have seen the worst of mankind, but did you find hope even there?” 

He thought of the time he’d spent hunting down the cartels as one of their own, secured in their bosom like a poisonous asp on the breast of some great Queen. There was no order, not in any of that. The cartels had kept a rough sort of law on their blocks and in their territories. Most people knew what they had to do to keep in line—but of course, it was always imperfect. You couldn’t go a couple weeks without hearing about some poor kid getting shot unintentionally, because bullets can’t easily be controlled. And him—what he did was break up that order. He brought prison time in his wake and drew people under the surface, to drown in the opaque legal system that didn’t have a place for them. That was enforcing order, of a kind, but the movement of justice was too inexorable and inhuman to be thought of as worthy. 

Lecter’s hand interrupted his scowling at the stained plastic surface of the table. He was holding a lit cigarette, pinched between thumb and ring finger, offering it up. Rust took it and leaned back, forced himself to look up and face Lecter like a man. 

“I didn’t feel like I was bringing order to anything, brother,” he said. “I was—I was a type of poison, one that killed you slowly. Nobody but me could see the way that their bodies would decay and rot away into dust when they came in contact with me.” 

“You were bringing evil-doers in for punishment,” Lecter said. It didn’t sound like disagreement. 

“I was pointlessly rearranging where people lived and where people died. But the people still died and killed,” he said. 

“From what I understand, you were very good at what you did,” he said. “Not many people could have maintained undercover work like that, for such an extended period.” 

“Sometimes when a buncha people couldn’t do a thing, that’s just a sign the thing shouldn’t get done,” Rust said. “I worked for four years and the world is exactly the same as it ever was.”

“That sounds like hopelessness,” Lecter said. “What would your daughter think, to hear you talk about yourself like that? Didn’t she think the world of you?” 

Rust saw her eyes, clear as day. They were a sweet, childish blue. Her hair was still light—he had known it would darken, as she got older. The eyes would grow weary. She’d learn to look at him and see him, instead of the gleaming impossible figure of fatherhood that he’d been to her. 

He thought, for the first time and with sure-eyed perfect clarity, that it was better for him that she was dead. And—he’d picked up a hooker, once, booked her and sent her away because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and she got swept up in a bust that wasn’t at all about her. Her teeth had been yellow and she’d reeked of flowers soaked in alcohol, cheap perfume. She’d had blue eyes. Not the same color, but disarmingly pretty. 

The knock on the door startled him and he looked up at Lecter, wide-eyed. 

Lecter seemed satisfied.

* * *

Rust emerged into the sunny main room blinking and raw. Antiseptic stung his nose and he, by reflex, tracked down the cause—someone had vomited, near the door. Techs were still cleaning up. 

Sour smell of bile, he caught that too. Many unwashed bodies. 

The world seemed too bright. It was a perverse reversal of the allegory of the cave—instead of being sent out blinking into the light to see the eternal truth of the sun, he was emerging from the darkness with these new true _absences_ of truth. 

Like Plato’s prisoner, he had error dispelled from his mind, but the error was in thinking that there was anything beyond the cave. 

It wasn’t long before he was shepherded along to group with the rest of the patients who were well-behaved enough to go downstairs. There were many different wards in the hospital, roughly divided by age. The groups downstairs combined the talented tenth of each division—the young adults, adults, and geriatrics, all together, staring at each other, expected to talk about their feelings. 

Today they were discussing radical acceptance. 

“Radical acceptance isn’t about thinking reality is good,” the pretty brunette social worker said. “It is about acknowledging reality.”

Mike interrupted her to ask for valium. It was pathetic. Rust was torn between contempt for him and the fatal certainty that none of them were any better, all of them were in the position of supplicants in the face of the clinicians around them. 

Instead of trying to get the group back on track, Rust practiced some radical acceptance of his own and idly drew in his notebook. He drew strange shapes and forms, slanting ovals that turned into his eyes. His daughter’s eyes, half-remembered. She was dead and he accepted it—there was euphoria to it, the purity of this despair. It was better that his daughter was dead, because at the end of the day, he would have always ended up here. 

“Radical acceptance is without judgment,” she said, after Mike had been subdued for the moment. 

He snorted—the only human thing left was judgment, the ability to make a choice. All he had was the ability to choose. The only really serious philosophical problem, after all. 

“Rust?” she asked, kindly. “It sounds like you have a reaction to that.” 

“No ma’am,” he said. There was nothing he could share that was appropriate for his role as obedient psychiatric patient. 

He floated to dinner after group, thinking thank the Lord I have privileges. At least I can go down the stairs, every so often. At least I can see a different room, a different set of locked doors and barred windows. 

The little lies that made a life bearable. 

He ate his dinner and thought more of eyes. He drew in his notebook, shoving his tray to the side and ignoring the manic that chattered next to him with no regard to whether or not he was listening. He was saying something about inventing a device that could measure gravity and Rust didn’t have the heart to break the news to him of the existence of the scale. 

He was not a good enough artist to capture his thoughts and the images that were burned into them. 

But the effort to recall the specificity brought him back to Lecter—Lecter’s eyes, sloping downward, dark and pleased. The man didn’t blink enough. Eyes that faced forward suggested the bearer was a carnivore—you needed depth perception to track prey. 

Lecter would agree with radical acceptance, he thought. Based on how he was talking, the thing that Rust needed to most accept was the futility of his own life—

Like he’d been dunked in a bucket of ice-water on a hot day, he came back into his own body with a shocked gasp. He scratched out the inexpert drawing of Lecter he was making and started taking notes in a cramped, private shorthand. He wrote down every beat he could remember of their conversations, every word. 

They had to chivvy him away from the table when dinner time was up. He reread what he had already written as he walked up the stairs, entirely focused on his own handwriting. 

By the time they locked him back in the ward, he was furious.

* * *

“I’ve been wondering,” Rust said the next morning, before he even sat down, “what your end goal is.”

Dr. Lecter was unperturbed. 

“I told you, Rust. I want to help you find hope,” he said. 

“I think that’s bullshit,” Rust said. He sat down hard on the seat across the table from Lecter. The plastic creaked. He already had a cigarette lit in his hand, but it was mostly just burning. He was too busy thinking to smoke it. 

“Don’t get me wrong, doc, you’re good at bullshit. But I’ve a nose for that sort of thing and you stink.”

Lecter frowned a little at the metaphor and Rust gestured at him, smoke curling up in the air between them. 

“Not literally, of course. You smell very nice. Expensive cologne.”

“It’s a personal blend,” he said. “Costs nothing more than materials.”

Rust jabbed his cigarette at him. “See, that’s peculiar. You know that’s peculiar. People in Lubbock don’t make their own goddamn perfume and men don’t wear jasmine and gardenia.”

“You’re in Lubbock, Rust,” Dr. Lecter said. “And you picked out the notes of my cologne with your nose.”

Rust sniffed and took a long drag of his cigarette, trying to smother the indolic curl of white flowers in his nose with ash and cheap tobacco. 

“But we’ve gotten distracted,” Lecter said. “You were going to tell me what my goal was.”

This was a game. A strange fucking game. He didn’t know the rules, but it was by far the most interesting thing happening in this liminal cage they’d stashed him in. He just had to remember that Lecter was _toying_ with him. He wasn’t any kind of doctor, even if you just took his own word for what a good doctor would be doing. 

“I was,” Rust said. “I was, at that. You’re trying to see if you can talk me to death. You want to see if you can persuade me to die. I’m a good candidate for it. Like you said, the hardest part of the suicidal person, I’ve already got—I’m not afraid of violence. All that’s left is the hopelessness and uselessness and you think you can persuade me of that.”

He was talking without even knowing where the words were coming from, but he knew they were true. He could feel it in his gut. Lecter fancied himself a predator, he could see it in his cool eyes. He had a polite sort of menace that might have read to richer folks as class, but Rust always was suspicious of people who carried themselves too smooth. It made it easy to see that he wasn’t the usual sort of wealthy-sinister. 

Lecter sat back in his chair and steepled his hands together. He looked—pleased. Why the fuck was he pleased. 

“You sound delusional, Rust,” he said. “I’d hate to have to report this level of paranoia to my attending. It might change your diagnosis.”

“I’m not fucking around with you,” he said. “And I’m not goddamned paranoid.”

“Paranoid schizophrenics describe their delusions as the most real things in the world,” Lecter said. “More real than anything actually in the phenomenal world we live in. More real than their bodies and the bodies of their friends.”

“I always know,” Rust said. “I always know what’s real.”

“Do you,” Lecter said. It wasn’t a question. “What do you see that isn’t real?”

“This isn’t about me,” Rust said. 

Lecter actually laughed at that—he was a goddamned kid, playing with his food. 

“Actually, Rust. I’m your psychiatrist. This is the archetypical situation that is entirely about you. This isn’t a social call.”

“You are not a responsible psychiatrist,” Rust said, his voice quiet. He was torn between anger at Lecter and excitement about the surrealism of this encounter, the whole fascinating mess that he’d brought him into. It was much more interesting than the blank kindness of the other workers here, the complicated swirl of scrubs and floral shirts that made up the people he was supposed to listen to. 

“You are something else.”

Lecter cocked his head, still looking delighted with the entire world, or at least Rust, in this little room, accusing him of horrible things. 

“What do you think I am?” Lecter said. “Other than some boogeyman, talking you into jumping off the cliff.” 

The frustration of this overwhelmed the interest. Lecter was just so fucking _smug_, so sure of himself, so certain that he was the smartest man in the room. It got right under Rust’s skin. 

Rust stood up. “I’m done today.” 

He got up and left. Lecter watched him go without objection.

* * *

The nurses seemed scandalized when he emerged from the cave without being retrieved. 

“Rust, your time isn’t up—“

“I’m done,” he said, grim and certain. He went to his room, which he shared with a twitchy psychotic named Carl. He found Carl’s jerky movements (induced by his medication) eerie and he didn’t like how dark and small the room was, but it was better than being observed at the moment. 

The authorities of the ward, such as they were, let him be at first. They were unsettled, betrayed by him. He was a good patient, very compliant. He was able to follow instructions and take his medicine. He didn’t exert himself particularly hard in therapy, but he attended and was willing to answer questions. 

He was done with that bullshit for today. 

A nurse knocked at his door and then came in before he said anything. 

“You are missing group, Rust,” he said. 

Rust took a deep drag of his cigarette. He was lying on his bed, back against the wall. The only reading material he had was a Bible that someone else had left. He had been flipping through it at random, reading bits and pieces of God’s word and looking for the fictional verse underneath. 

“I’m not going,” Rust said. He felt his anger pushing up against his tissue-paper skin, but he kept his voice calm and easy. 

The nurse looked at him. Rust looked back. He tried to remain calm, but there was no doubt in his mind that his expression approached “surly.” 

“Okay,” the nurse said, finally. “If that’s the choice you’re making.” 

It was. Rust visibly removed his attention from the intruder and flipped to Job, because he always had a flair for the dramatic and he was his own favorite audience.

* * *

By the next morning, the confusion of the chain of command had subsided into concern. They were used to erratic—it was practically the bread and butter—but there was a difference between expected disobedience and a compliant patient going mutinous. 

The pretty brunette girl who normally ran group knocked on his door when he missed morning meds and breakfast. She actually waited for him to give her permission to come in. 

The only things Carl reliably attended were meals, so his bed was empty. She sat on it, looking at him. 

“We’re worried about you, Rust,” she said. He was often fascinated by how she pulled on different emotional affects like they were pieces of clothing. Her detachment and professionalism taken off and smoothed on its hanger like a nice coat, replaced with sisterly concern.

“That’s sweet of you,” he said, not meaning it. “But there’s nothing to worry about.” 

“See, I’d have to disagree,” she said. “Your treatment regime is very important. Doing things like missing group, not taking your meds—that type of non-compliance has a serious risk of pushing back your discharge date.”

The staff always dangled discharge like the promise of Providence over the patients in the ward. Men who’d scorn any other reward would sit up and beg like dogs, just for the hope of getting out of here a couple days early. 

It wasn’t going to work on Rust, though. Rust had nothing for him out there and things in here were just starting to get interesting. 

“That would be a real shame,” he said. He did not bother to conceal his ridicule. 

She looked almost hurt. He’d put her into a false sense of security, apparently, with his dazed helpfulness these last few weeks. It sent a thrill through him now, to rip that away and push his unruly agency right to the forefront. 

“I hope you reconsider this course, Rust,” she said. “We just want you to get better and get back to your life.”

A fine lie she was selling here. Looking at a bunch of folks that had good reason to be in here—whether it was their brain or their lives that were falling apart, they had real trouble—and then telling them that they should get better and get back to their life. Most of these people didn’t have any life to speak of—he knew _he_ didn’t. 

He let all of that show on his face. 

She stood up and left him alone in the room. He went back to reading the Bible. It was more amusing today. 

When he left the room to get lunch, he was unsurprised to find his privileges had been revoked. There was something unfair about it—people like Carl never cooperated with group, and he still got to go down to the cafeteria. But no-one really expected anything out of Carl other than taking his meds and staying nonviolent. Rust had shown himself capable of more compliance than that, so he was getting punished accordingly. He didn’t object. He just sat by the nurses station with a tray, next to the non-verbal autistic kid and violent ex-biker. The small cartons of apple juice looked absurd in all of their hands. 

“Rust.” 

His eyes jerked up. Lecter was standing in front of him, still in a suit. It was a Saturday, the doctors didn’t work today. But there he was, dressed as finely as he ever did, his ID card clipped neatly to his lapel. 

“Dr. Lecter,” he said.

Lecter smiled at him and handed him a book wrapped in brown paper. 

“I came in to give you some reading material, to assist us in our sessions,” he said. 

“Thank you,” Rust said. He didn’t want to open the book in front of Lecter.

Lecter nodded his head in acknowledgment. 

“Enjoy your meal,” he said. His contempt for the congealing grilled cheese was barely concealed, but Rust didn’t blame him. 

He kept the book wrapped until he could go back and be in his room. Carl was there, but Carl had long since learned that Rust wasn’t much interested in talking to him. 

He ripped the paper and revealed the book: _Studies in Pessimism: The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer.”_ One essay was marked and he flipped to it immediately—the chapter was called “On Suicide.”

Well, that was interesting. 

He settled into read and when he was finished, he read it again. 

That Sunday, he spent the day reading, finally branching out into the other essays in the volume. Mary, the developmentally disabled woman with the body of a truck and long beautiful hair her mother came and brushed for her, had a cold and she didn’t know to cover her mouth when she coughed. It made Mike so angry that he nearly started a fight with her over it, but she didn’t understand enough to realize he was angry and she laughed and laughed.

Rust kept his nose in the book.

* * *

“You trying to persuade me you don’t want me to kill myself by giving me an essay advocating suicide, doc?” Rust said. 

The fury from before had faded—it was a strange sort of apology, but that was the spirit he took it in. 

“I trust your acuity,” Lecter said mildly. “What did you get out of the essay?” 

Rust picked the book up and flipped it to a page, starting to read: “There is no tenable reason left, on the score of morality, for condemning suicide.” 

“Is that the conclusion of the essay?” Lecter asked. 

“Am I being graded on this or something?” Rust leaned back in his chair and lit another cigarette. He felt compelled to keep smoking them, like a dying man wanting to work through his stash. He felt like he’d turn around and find he was no longer compliant enough to have the privilege. 

“Would you prefer me to ask you about your mother?”

He barked a laugh. “Shit, y’all actually do that?” 

The half-smile on Lecter’s face was more compelling than it ought to be. “Some of us do.” 

“Not many bring their patients books like this, I imagine,” Rust said. 

“How many patients in here would know what to do with a book like this?” Lecter said. “You aren’t like most patients.”

The statement lit Rust up from the inside. He’d had a number of conversations with the authority structure around here, moments where he felt a shared understanding that he was different, that he wasn’t your average lunatic. It never quite stuck, though—he was never able to escape the position he was in, the soft clothing, the slippers on his feet. He was always the penitent beggar, a child in the face of the adults around him. 

He wasn’t sure if it was some sort of professional standard not to compare patients to one another or if they genuinely didn’t think he was any different, but it felt like being seen, Lecter intimating that he wasn’t like the rest. 

“Flatterer,” Rust said, spitting it out like a curse, because it felt too good and hit too hard. 

Lecter leaned in a little bit. He was wearing a checked suit today—subtle enough that maybe if you weren’t looking the blue just might seem like it had unusual depth. Queer looking suit, Rust thought suddenly. 

“What do you think the actual conclusion of the essay was, Rust?” 

He licked his lips and stared at Lecter a moment, going still. They just looked at each other and Rust would give a lot to know exactly what Lecter was thinking, what made that itch build up behind Rust’s teeth. He shook it off like an animal banishing a fly and picked up the book again. 

“Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment — a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to an answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man’s existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.”

“What does that mean, Rust?” he said. His voice was soft. 

Rust leaned in and said, “Well, one thing I’m hoping is that you have a little better sense of me as an empirical observer of the human condition now.” 

“Not aiming to abandon the smaller experiments just yet?” 

“Nope,” Rust said, stubbing out his cigarette. “I’m waiting on too many answers.”

* * *

It was a pretty thing to say, but when he was back in the blankness of the ward, he felt like he lost track of each and every question. 

Maybe something about him had the air of wanting conversation, because he couldn’t chase people away tonight. 

Jason was a skinny dude and if they’d been on the outside, Rust would have had him pegged as a tweaker. He spoke so fast the words stumbled over themselves and when he paused for Rust to answer a question, he’d get distracted by his own thoughts and just continue on talking. Rust had already chased a couple folks off and Jason didn’t really need his participation in the conversation, so he was fine with letting him stay. 

He was telling Rust about how many times he’d been here, in North Shore. It sounded just like his old gang, like folks bragging about their last stint in prison. 

“My first attempt was when I was fourteen,” Jason said. 

He heard an echo of Ginger, one upping some other guy by talking about the job he’d pulled that was so dirty they’d wanted to try him as an adult, but his balls hadn’t even dropped yet. 

Rust closed his eyes and let his head tip back. He hated it here, like everyone hated it here, but he could see why some guys got insecure being too long away. It wasn’t even in this world—somewhere neither heaven nor hell, despite all the screaming. Purgatory, maybe, with all their promises of self-improvement. 

Someone’s throat cleared and Rust’s eyes snapped open. Lecter was standing there with a plastic bag in his hand, dressed in his suit from this morning. It was well after dinner, now. He was surely off work, even with a resident’s hours. 

“Our session today went so well that I thought you might want some more things to read,” he said. Rust sat up straight.

Lecter handed him the bag. Rust went to take the books out, but Lecter’s hand landed heavy on his shoulder. He stilled. 

“Thank you, doctor,” he said. 

“Of course,” Lecter said. “Our next meeting is after the weekend. You should have plenty of time to get some reading done.” 

Rust felt his lids go heavy, looking up at him. 

“Getting bored of me already?” 

“Impossible,” Lecter said. “But unfortunately, I do not have final say in my time here.” 

He sounded deeply annoyed by this and it was the only good reason Rust had heard yet for wanting to get out. It was that thought that kept him from making a joke that might up his priority level a little bit around here. 

Instead, he let Lecter squeeze his shoulder and take his leave. 

Jason had kept talking the whole time.

* * *

There were three books, each clean new paperbacks like the last one: _The World as Will and Representation_ by Schopenhauer, _A Genealogy of Morals_ by Nietzsche, and _Philosophy in the Boudoir_ by the Marquis de Sade. The last one caught his attention and his breath. He ran his palm over the dark, mostly black cover and flipped to the opening pages. 

There was a small drawing of a bush of gardenias, impeccably and perfectly done. There was no note, but it was signed: _H.L._. 

That was enough to get him to start with that.

* * *

_ May humanity, fraternity, benevolence prescribe our reciprocal obligations, and let us individually fulfil them with the simple degree of energy Nature has given us to this end; let us do so without blaming, and above all without punishing, those who, of chillier temper or more acrimonious humour, do not notice in these yet very touching social ties all the sweetness and gentleness others discover therein; for, it will be agreed, to seek to impose universal laws would be a palpable absurdity: such a proceeding would be as ridiculous as that of the general who would have all his soldiers dressed in a uniform of the same size; it is a terrible injustice to require that men of unlike character all be ruled by the same law: what is good for one is not at all good for another_.

Reading the Marquis de Sade felt a little like Lecter had given him his diary. He didn’t know the man, had never seen him out of the strange backstage space of the psychiatric ward, but he was utterly certain that Lecter thought himself one of the men who ought not be ruled by mere human law. 

The knowledge made the part of him that had spent his whole life enforcing the law sit up and take note—the rest of him was paying just as close attention and he didn’t entirely understand the full scope of the reason. 

After a couple of days, he found himself putting down the heavy philosophy that Lecter had given him and picking up the Bible again. He leafed through, aimlessly, reading bits and pieces of passages for a kaleidoscope of unconnected imagery. 

There was a new woman on the ward who cried, all the time. It wasn’t loud or intrusive—but Rust found his eyes catching on her wet face every time he glanced her direction. 

She looked helpless. He had this doubled sense where he knew he was supposed to feel contempt for that; he didn’t. 

He lingered, for a long time, on a passage in Corinthians about being part of the body of Christ. If there was no Christ, and he was pretty sure there wasn’t, he wondered what it meant to be part of the same body.

* * *

“Normally, men would buy me a drink first,” Rust said. He sat sprawled on the small plastic chair, his chest opened up toward Lecter. 

“I imagine when you usually have men there isn’t nearly this much talking,” Lecter said. 

That made Rust laugh, because he wasn’t wrong. 

“As long as we think of this as a conversation and not a game you’re playing, I’m enjoying our little discussions,” he said. “Since we apparently have stopped pretending you’re here as my doctor.” 

Lecter reached over and grabbed Rust’s pack of cigarettes without asking. He stuck two in his mouth, lighting them both, before handing one over to Rust. He didn’t deny that he wasn’t much of a doctor. Rust wrapped his lips in precisely the same spot on the filter that Lecter had used, but his saliva was imperceptible. 

“That de Sade book,” Lecter said. “You might think it is just flirtation, but it is perhaps the most philosophically important of the three. I look forward to hearing what you think of it.” 

“Let’s talk about philosophy tomorrow,” Rust said. “You’ve been asking too many questions. My turn.”

Lecter raised an eyebrow but did not object. 

Rust took a drag. “What brings a Lithuanian doctor to Lubbock?” 

“It is impossible for Americans to understand how young this country is,” Lecter said. It didn’t feel like the beginning of an answer to his question, but Rust let him continue. “Everything feels so indescribably new. Even the trees are too young, shallowly rooted. I walk in what passes for nature on the Eastern Seaboard and half-expect a light wind to pluck them up like carrots.” 

“We don’t have any old trees around here,” Rust said. 

“I was looking for the wild,” Lecter said. “Or what passes for wilderness on this continent. I don’t think I’ve had a moment in nature that approaches the sublime here until I was out at night in the desert and saw the slow, building light of the sun in the impossibly huge sky.” 

“You need to go to Alaska,” he said. “If you’re looking for the truly untamed.” 

“Now that I’m here, I’ve found some things to hold my attention,” Lecter said easily. 

Rust tapped his cigarette against the rim of the paper cup a couple times, considering. It was disarming how easily Lecter was admitting his interest, now that Rust had forced their conversations on to a different track. 

“And your first move, in finding something interesting, is to look for a unique way to kill it?” he said. His tone made it a joke, but it wasn’t. He hadn’t forgotten the deft way Lecter had tried to strip his hope from him. 

“Yes,” Lecter said, entirely serious. “That’s exactly right.” 

“Why’s that?” Rust said. His voice was rough and low in his register. He found himself leaning forward, closer to Lecter. Lecter leaned in, too. 

“I think you know the answer to that, Rust,” he said. 

“Dr. Lecter—“

“Hannibal,” he said. “I think that at this point, we are on a first name basis.” 

Rust licked his lips. Lecter—_Hannibal_ was inviting him to make a read of the situation. It was as much an offer to project as anything else—it was probably an attempt to not say anything too incriminating, nothing specific enough that even a mental patient would be believed if repeated. 

He was enjoying the game, though. He wanted to see where this went. He decided to talk about himself.

“When I killed the junkie scum who murdered his little baby girl by shooting her up with crank,” Rust said. “That was the most I’ve felt like a human being. I made a choice about what I would allow in the world and I enforced it, violently. My will was executed in the splattering of his brains on cheap, shiny motel blankets.”

“How long did you stay in that room, with the dead bodies, before you told anyone?” Hannibal said. 

“At least an hour,” he said. “I had to see a whole host of shrinks, after that. While they were making the deal that sent me undercover for the next four years. Everyone wanted to ask about what I did in that hour, why I waited so long to call it in.”

“I know the answer to that,” Hannibal said. 

“Tell me,” Rust said. 

“You wanted some time to linger in your power,” Hannibal said. 

“Guess that makes me a bad man,” Rust said. 

Hannibal hummed, neither agreeing nor dissenting. 

“The junkie killed his child out of madness. Because he was incapable of making an actual decision—whatever nonsense passed through his brain and looked like a decision wasn’t any act of will,” Hannibal said. “Killing him was no different than killing cattle. Better, because you were making a point.” 

“Kill many cows, Hannibal?” Rust asked.

Hannibal inclined his head, which wasn’t quite an answer, but wasn’t entirely apart from one either. 

“People kill for many reasons,” he said. “Some do it out of a sense of ritual. An offering to something greater. Others kill out of sexual gratification. Both of these are very human urges, in their way—paired, in a sense. The ritualistic murderer creates something larger than himself and sacrifices blood on the alter. The sexual murderer creates something lower and gets off on the filth. It’s not far from bestiality, in its way.” 

“I’m surprised at your contempt,” Rust said, leaning in. He was mumbling around his cigarette, balanced on his lower lip. His palms were flat on the table. “I thought _you_ were the type to get off on killing.” 

“I’m not aroused by meat,” Hannibal said, with scorn. “I’m aroused by _humanity_. By not needing something bigger or smaller because you’re exactly, precisely enough to make your mark on the world.” 

“By those standards, I reckon there aren’t all that many humans out there,” Rust said. 

“No,” Hannibal said. “There are not.” 

He studied Rust for a long time, his eyes dark like marbles in his skull. 

It made Rust smile, strangely giddy. 

“Have I reached the status of mankind?” he said. 

“That’s up to you,” Hannibal said. “Are you going to take what you want?” 

Rust pushed his cigarette into the bottom of his paper cup, putting it out, and felt the prickling urge to look back at the door and verify what he knew to be the case—the glass was smoked, impossible to see through. The door wasn’t locked, but they had time. 

He didn’t want to show weakness, so all he did was stand and walk over to Hannibal. Hannibal pushed back from the table and went tense—Rust wondering if he saw this decision coming or was half-expecting to get punched. 

Rust went to his knees and ran his hands up Lecter’s thighs. 

“Thing about sucking dick that a lotta guys never get,” he said, all casual, carefully unbuckling Hannibal’s belt and unzipping his fly, “is that it isn’t really submissive in itself. I could kill you by biting your dick off, and making you come, well—“

Hannibal laughed. 

“The little death, yes,” he said. 

Rust grinned up at him and got his dick out—he wasn’t nearly hard yet, but that made it even better. He leaned in and took him all the way in his mouth, swallowing him down—he pressed his nose into the fabric of Hannibal’s pants, smelling clean laundry, sweat, sex, gardenias. 

He was on his knees and had a dick in his mouth, but he heard Hannibal gasp because of him. He sucked, making himself warm and welcoming in the way that none of this was, really, and felt the flesh of him twitch, tasted his skin. It wasn’t killing him, but it was something else, something visceral and human in a way that Hannibal didn’t seem to understand. He could kill Hannibal like this, clench his jaw down and replace his animal musk with copper blood, but he didn’t—he chose not to. He chose to give him pleasure, instead. 

Bestiality, he thought, and realized that Hannibal was still talking a lot of bullshit. Animals didn’t suck cock, there wasn’t any point to it. It wasn’t part of the reproductive march toward futurity. It was entirely fruitless, a purely social act of human connection. 

He breathed through his nose and felt him grow, until he was nearly choking, until he had to work to keep Hannibal in his mouth and spit was dripping down his chin and he could feel the helpless small twitches of Hannibal’s hips as he struggled to keep in control, struggled and failed, because Rust was in control and he was choosing to make Hannibal come as quickly and as ruthlessly as possible. He used every trick he could, sucking Hannibal hard and wet, letting it be dirty. 

Hannibal’s muffled noises sounded almost startled and Rust wondered where he had thought this was going, if not for right here. 

He sucked until his jaw ached and when Hannibal came, he felt victorious. 

Leaning back, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and swallowed. Looking up, Hannibal was undone in a way he’d never seen him—blood was high in his cheeks and his mouth was bitten to keep silent. He could see sweat ever so subtly darkening the collar of his shirt. 

Rust smiled up at him and pulled himself to his feet. Hannibal didn’t seem like he had much to say and Rust couldn’t quite come up with something to sneer, something about insufficient self-control. 

Without sitting, he reached down for his pack of cigarettes and lit one. Semen tasted familiar with smoke in his mouth: the only thing it was missing was liquor. 

“One of these days you’re gonna have to tell me about your hobbies in more detail,” Rust said. 

He could see Hannibal visibly try to gather himself, but he was breathless and Rust could see the effects of what he had done all over his face. 

“Are you considering leaving the pursuit of law and order?” Hannibal asked, finally. 

Rust grinned, wolfish. “Nope. In fact, I think I might go back and do homicide.”

Hannibal’s eyebrows raised but his eyes went cold, calculating. 

“The way I figure is that the people who kill out of madness or lust, they’re not ever going to stop themselves,” Rust said. “I could use my teeth to protect the herd.”

“So you want to push back the dark once more,” Hannibal said. 

“Nah, man,” Rust said. “But it’ll be something to do.”

* * *

_The conviction that the world, and therefore man too, is something which really ought not to exist is in fact calculated to instill in us indulgence towards one another: for what can be expected of beings placed in such a situation as we are? From this point of view one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, _compagnon de misères._ However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes._ \- Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

fin.


End file.
